Living a positively purposeful life by beginning within yourself.

First Friday Finds: Falling Fruit

Wow! Another month has come and gone. It’s time for our First Friday Find for September.

I give the credit all to my Dad for this month’s find. He told me about a website he read about in the AARP Magazine. The name of the find is the same as its website: http://fallingfruit.org.

It’s a website that pinpoints on a map where edible agriculture is out there for the free picking. The downside is that most of the data is user-submitted. As a result, the fruit plucking potential in an area will only be as abundant as the amount of people aware that such a site exists in the first place.

My husband and I eagerly searched the site as soon as we learned about it. We were joking that we expected to see our home on the map. We have a peach tree and an Italian Plum tree that overhang the sidewalk to the side of our house. That portion is free for the picking. Sadly, our city only has six spots noted. I thought that was poor representation until I saw that the entire county in Southern California where I grew up only has five spots posted.

The website came to fruition (pun intended) thanks to two Colorado scientists, Ethan Welty and Caleb Phillips. The co-founders focused their efforts on finding edible fruit in some two dozen cities. North of Downtown Los Angeles must have their very own representative. There are hundreds of urban fruit spots noted in Edendale and Silver Lake neighborhoods alone.

Go ahead and check out your location and see what you can find! If your city is not sufficiently represented on the pinpoint map, then keep your eyes peeled for some sweet spots to submit yourself.